Almanac Seller. Ah, dear sir, would to God that I could!
Passer-by. But if you had to live over again the life you have already lived, with all its pleasures and sufferings?
Almanac Seller. I should not like that.
Passer-by. Then what other life would you like to live? Mine, or that of the prince, or whose? Do you not think that I, or the prince, or anyone else would reply exactly as you have done, and that no one would wish to repeat the same life over again?
Almanac Seller. Yes, I believe that....
Passer-by. And it is clear that each person is of opinion that the evil he has experienced exceeds the good; ... but with the new year fate will commence treating you, and me, and everyone well, and the happy life will begin....
Almanac Seller. Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars![142]
Persistent novelty in the universe.
Many of us no doubt would reply to the poet as the almanac seller did—we should not wish to begin our life over again—but it is not to be concluded from that that our past life, taken as a whole, has been unhappy rather than happy. It is to be concluded simply that it has lost its novelty, and with its novelty a great part of its charm. Man, in effect, is not a purely sensitive being. His pleasures are, so to speak, not blind. He not only enjoys, he knows that he enjoys, and knows what he enjoys, and each of his sensations constitutes an addition to his treasures of knowledge. Having once begun to amass this treasure, he desires incessantly to augment it, though he cares little enough futilely to handle and to contemplate the wealth already acquired. Our past life, therefore, is to some extent tarnished and deflowered. The number of hours that were so rich, so full that we could not exhaust them at the time and desire to repeat them, is not great; and, barring such hours, the principal charm of the rest of our past existence lay in estimating its details, in comparing them with each other, in exercising upon them our intelligence and our activity, and in lightly passing them by; they were not worth lingering over; they resembled the tracts of country that the traveller does not feel tempted to turn and look back upon. If novelty possesses for mankind a certain charm, if a repetition of identically similar circumstances rarely affords as great pleasure the second time as the first, the fact is owing in part to the very laws of desire, but in part to the superiority of the human mind; the desired object should always offer something new to the intelligence. Every desire contains an element of philosophic and æsthetic curiosity that the past cannot satisfy; the flower of novelty cannot be gathered twice from the same branch.